For Each Refrain
by flecksofpoppy
Summary: Written for the Dreamwidth comm areyougame. Prompt request was, Cloud/Tifa: Lonely Piano Piece - "You're not alone anymore."


Written for the Dreamwidth comm areyougame. Prompt request was, Cloud/Tifa: Lonely Piano Piece - _"You're not alone anymore."_ I don't really write a lot of het!fic, but I was a total Cloud/Tifa shipper back when I first played the game as a teenager. I still have a soft spot for our traumatized friends from Nibelheim.

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><p><strong>For Each Refrain<strong>

Tifa had always been more of a fighter than a piano player. She liked leather gloves more than piano keys, the way they bent and fit so perfectly to her hands, warmed and pliant, a product of the earth in color and in origin. Dead carcass, really, but she never thought of it like that, never thought of leather as the result of slaughter. To her, it was a second skin, and although she enjoyed a good fight, she never had any real desire to kill.

Tifa sometimes hummed songs low in her throat when she trained; it was rarely angry, but physical, sweaty, bodily. She liked the fatigue that settled into her bones after her muscles were ready to give way, after she had beaten up on whatever she could find, expending energy and finding reprieve. Battered trees absorbed her thoughts, her mind finally slowing as soon as a roundhouse kick or a punch landed and vibrated through her fist, through her gloves.

But she knew how to play the piano.

Sometimes, at night in the echoing sounds that Edge emitted, she would hear songs in the noise of late-night construction, creaking metal, soldering-Shinra, there, right in her ears-mixed with people yelling drunkenly in the streets, a split second of blissful forgetfulness for a world weary populace.

Tifa hid things. There was a safe underneath the bar, and sometimes, on the rare occasion that no one else was around, she would agilely flip in the combination, almost wishing that she would make a mistake, forget the numbers, forget how to return to the past that she promised herself she wouldn't over and over.

Carefully she would unfold the brittle letter, the familiar handwriting beginning to fade. Zangan's script was short and haphazardly formed; he had been dying.

_To my most precious student..._and she had been flattered, even at the imminent end of the world, reading it for the first time, caught up with Cloud in a replica house that looked exactly like her old one.

And she'd re-read it, and cry, privately, quietly, lock herself away in the back room with the cash register and the phone calls for deliveries. She sometimes pictured what it would be like if they were still in Midgar, if none of this had ever happened, and wondered if she'd be any happier. If Cloud had been there as her friend, and not as a mercenary.

But knowing what she knew now, nothing could have ever been different. The simple memory of a night on a well with a boy who didn't look at her the way the others did, a scrawny kid headed to the big city, was nothing compared to everything going on around them. Genocide, conspiracies, betrayal, experiments, the end of the world.

She had forgotten starry skies by the time that Cloud showed up in Midgar. Her old childhood friend. A stranger. Black hooded figures, numbers, mothers without sons, mothers with too many sons.

She had never wanted any of it.

Marlene wanted to learn how to play the piano. She was growing up quickly; Barrett still looked surprised when he'd stop in to see her, find her two inches taller, and he'd look at Tifa and say under his breath, in his own gruff manner, _Never had one of my own._

Tifa would just smile. She'd smile until it hurt. And she'd say, _But she is yours._

Cloud had gotten the piano. Cloud, ever the unexpected source of bittersweet joy. She didn't know where or who or how, but there it was one day, upstairs, fit haphazardly into the corner of Marlene's room. Denzel had given it one look; he was curious, but he just stayed back when Marlene ran forward eagerly and banged down on the keys all at once.

And Tifa found herself saying, _Careful, careful; it's delicate._

The black and white keys were suddenly comforting in ways Tifa had never expected; they were smooth, like nothing in this world now. And even though there were a few broken ones, a few discordant notes, they still made a melody when played together.

She pulled out the old sheet music one day when no one was home, slipped her fingers over the cool keys, and closed her eyes. And she had no leather gloves, and she had no warmth, and she had no youth.

So she played. Because there was nothing else to do on this lazy day, in this ramshackle city that Shinra had built on the edge of a tomb that held her friends' bodies-her friends that those Turks who still came around asking for favors had killed. She played.

She remembered; she let herself recall.

Funerals were never commonplace in Midgar. Funerals were not commonplace in Edge either, and everyone inevitably sank back into the cement and the metal and the buildings.

But there were forests here, outside of the soldered metal cage, the flutter of leaves in the wind.

Her fingers felt heavy on the keys.

She remembered a knotted stick that she used to use to traverse the sharp mountains, forests, the fresh smell of her childhood. She remembered being covered in blood, riding on Zangan's back, the smell of burning, when she had vowed to never to be weak again, to never be carried on a man's back.

She remembered the replica house with a replica piano that she and Cloud had played together on their way to the Northern Crater. Cloud-no longer that scrawny boy on the well, no longer full of secrets.

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><p>And then Cloud's hand on her shoulder as he asks, "That sounds familiar. Are you teaching that one to Marlene?"<p>

She finally turns around and the music stops. The notes hang in the air like so much smoke and she wonders about his eyes, how they look at her, how they always have, through _everything,_because there is no other word to encompass what they have been through.

His arms have gotten bigger since Nibelheim. Years have passed; decades. Everything, slipping through her ungloved fingers like smooth cool ivory, notes, music.

She looks at him and focuses on his neck, on his collarbones, and somehow, they look the same as when they first met as children. He had been holding his mother's hand, and he had looked at her from across the square, and said quietly, _hello._

"Hello," he says now. His hand on her shoulder feels heavy, and there is skin on skin, the past on the present.

She stops playing, tries to stop her fingers from trembling, and waits.

"Familiar?" she asks. Her own voice sounds like his first hello.

"Yeah," he says.

And then he takes his gloves off, lays them on top of the piano. Her fingers are curling into fists unconsciously, and she thinks of carcass glove leather, trees destroyed for this instrument, everything held within the finger strokes on keys and strings pulled so tight that they can create music.

The sheet music is being folded carefully in half and placed next to his gloves, and then she shudders when his callused hands lightly slide down her arms, and he bends forward, his breath warm next to her neck.

He knows the song better than she does, and with his hands over hers, their fingers touch the keys together and play the song from the beginning, slowly. This time there's no letter to be found, no Nibelheim here, just sweetly dissonant music played right through until the end, when the notes stop climbing and falling, and they stay there together with only the soft buzzing of a fly in the room, the hot sun pouring through the open window; soldering, metal, Cloud's breath.

"I can teach her this one," Cloud finally says, and leaves his gloves off.


End file.
